The Spirit of Wales Distillery

My first in-person visit to a distillery since the pandemic struck was coincidental, to a distillery that probably wouldn’t exist if the pandemic hadn’t happened.

When the coronavirus first began to spread around the world, Englishman Daniel Dyer was working in Orlando, while his family was back home in the UK. He made a quick decision to sell his Orlando business and return to be with his family. He had no further plans, but fate eventually led to Dyer founding the Spirit of Wales in the industrial city of Newport, about 10 miles east of the Welsh capital, Cardiff.

Launching a distillery during a pandemic is obviously not ideal. “We were supposed to open up in March 2021,’ he says, ‘but then we had a delay, delay, delay…builders, constructions, and other bits and pieces. We finally launched our first spirits at the end of July.”

James Gibbons and Daniel Dyer of Spirit of Wales

From Hobby to Career

 Although he worked in the world of software, Dyer was no stranger to distilling. “I’d been in Orlando five years,” he says, ‘and there was a local brewery/distillery just down the road from me, which had started making their own bourbon from their beers, using their beers as a base. I went down and helped out on Sundays and basically learned how they were running their process.’

Some weekends he would also drive up to Kentucky to visit moonshine and bourbon distilleries. Prior to Orlando he had been working in Eastern Europe for several years, and there too his weekends were taken up with visiting distilleries. What started as a hobby and an interest, was turning into a passion.

Reunited with his family in 2020, he applied for a Rectifier’s Licence, which allowed him to distil spirits at home. He began to experiment with some gin recipes, and in October 2020 he met James Gibbons. Gibbons, a chemical engineer, had also returned to the UK after working in a distillery on the Spanish island of Mallorca, making Palma Gin. It’s a story you hear over and over in the spirits business: two or three people meet in the right place at the right time and decide to start a distillery.

James Gibbons of Spirit of Wales

A Distillery in Newport

So why Newport? Is Dyer a local lad? “No. I’m from Cornwall, from just outside Newquay. But my grandfather lived in South Wales and worked in the coal mines here. During the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, he would pay a couple of pennies and take the paddle steamer down from Wales to Cornwall, with the coal on it. He would go down there for a weekend, and that’s where he met my grandmother, who was working in one of the harbours. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

Dyer links to his grandfather’s coal-mining past by using anthracite for his filtration process, rather than carbon. Anthracite is a hard coal, with the highest carbon content of any coal, and Dyer sources his from the Betws Colliery in the heart of the South Wales coal mining fields. He’s very much committed to the local area, and named one of the distillery’s brands Steeltown, in a nod towards Newport’s industrial heritage.

Flavored Vodkas, Rums and Gins

So far, Steeltown has produced a Welsh Dry Gin, a Welsh Blueberry Gin, a Welsh White Rum, and a Welsh Vodka. The vodka’s unusual as it’s a triple-grain vodka, using wheat, barley, and rye, giving it a complex and very well-balanced taste.

It’s clear that Dyer is one for experimenting, having released several distillery-only small-batches. One is a lapsang tea flavored vodka, simple because Dyer likes teas, and another is vodka infused with coffee beans. Says Dyer, “The lapsang vodka was purely an experiment, and for me, it worked. I think it’s unique. I’ve certainly not come across another one. I’ll be experimenting more, with other tea flavors. We’ve also used lapsang with a smoked rum, and it gives it more of a campfire sort-of finish.”

The Spirit of Wales’s other main brand is Dragons’ Breath, the red dragon being the symbol of Wales. The bottles also contain words from the Welsh poet W.H. Davies, author of Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. The Dragon’s Breath signature spirit is a Welsh Spiced Rum which, despite being only a few months old, has already won a Bronze Medal at the 2021 International Wine and Spirits Competition.

Experiments in Aging

As well as experimenting with combinations of flavors, Dyer and his partner are also experimenting with the aging process. “The benefits of working with a chemical engineer,” Dyer laughs. “But the traditional way of aging whisky, say, was set less than 100 years ago. It’s not thousands of years or hundreds of years, it’s less than a hundred years. So, by turning the barrel, by aerating it, by using a smaller barrel so there’s more spirit in contact with the wood, I can create the texture and taste of a three-year-old whisky in three months.”

He adds, “We’ve taken it a step further by using wood pellets. We’ve taken a bourbon barrel, which is a really fine grain, and turned it into pellets, and put these in the barrel so that we effectively increase the surface area of the barrel.”

Spirit of Wales Distillery Gin School

Looking Beyond the Pandemic

The Spirit of Wales is clearly not going to be a conventional distillery, churning out a standard range of spirits. Indeed, Dyer gives me a sample of the absinthe they’re working on, which will be the very first Welsh absinthe once they’ve perfected the recipe, though it already tastes pretty perfect to me.

The Welsh lockdown restrictions were among some of the toughest in the UK, especially affecting the hospitality industry, but this meant Dyer had to deal with the situation as it was, rather than dream of getting back to a pre-pandemic way of working. He was quick to embrace Zoom tastings, adding music and games for more of a party atmosphere, with some guests attending remotely from home, and others at the distillery.

Despite the pandemic, this young distillery is clearly thriving and inventive, and it makes you wonder what they would have achieved without the pandemic to battle. Or would they even exist at all?